#class collecting panel at Winkleman

hanging out after class

Thanks to everyone for following the #class collecting panel last night, both those inside the space and elsewhere online (there were over 1700 people watching the live stream at one point). We had a great time!

Thanks above all to Julia Weist, our facilitator, and the rest of our lovely and distinguished panel, whose names many may not have gotten when they were introduced.

And many thanks also to Ed Winkleman and Murat Orozobekov, our hosts, and to Jen Dalton and William Powhida, the overtaxed artists who dreamed up and continually enable #class for us all, for their own own vocal contributions to the conversation last night.

Barry and I were pretty pleased with how it went off, although we were surprised that most of the discussion stayed with practical issues, and, in spite of our pretty modest efforts during the evening to provoke it, there may have been little that would satisfy the larger project's intention that participants would meet "to examine the way art is made and seen in our culture and to identify and propose alternatives and/or reforms to the current market system."

We wanted to keep a light hand on the wheel, and more or less let the room run with the discussion, but we had hoped it would move onto a more theoretical level. We tried to nudge it in that direction, including posing the question of whether there was another way than the collecting model to serve both artists and the larger culture. In the end however, the "class" system survived the evening pretty much intact.

@remaerdyaD was wrong about the number of viewers watching the webcast during the collecting panel. He was looking at the total number of views since #class went on Ustream which, at the time, was 1706 total views. (Now it's up to 2,937.) I think I saw it get up to about 39 simultaneous viewers during the panel. http://twitter.com/artwhirled/status/9753718201